So far this year, the flood of Android tablets coming to market have mostly been of the larger-screen variety. Recently, however, manufacturers have begun following up their initial 10-inch offerings with scaled-down tablets in the 7 to 8-inch range. You can now add Toshiba to that list, as they’ve just unveiled a 7-inch Thrive.

It’s a shrunken spitting image of its big brother, with a 1GHz dual core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor under the hood teamed with 1GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of internal storage. Though 30% smaller, the 7-inch IPS touchscreen display still packs the same 1280×800 pixel resolution. The same 5 megapixel rear and 2 megapixel front cameras are on board, as are 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, A-GPS, and an accelerometer. Toshiba has opted to ship the Thrive 7-inch with plain vanilla Android 3.2 installed, though the popular keyboard replacement Swype is available as an option.

There are a few differences between the two tablets. For starters, the smaller Thrive doesn’t offer full size HDMI or USB ports like the original — they’ve been replaced with mini and micro versions. There’s also no removable battery cover, a feature many reviewers lauded about the 10-inch Thrive (since it meant the battery was user-replaceable). The Thrive 7-inch is also skinnier, at 12mm (compared to 15mm for the 10-inch) and it weighs just 400 grams (versus 771g).

Toshiba has stated that the Thrive 7-inch will launch in time for the 2011 holiday season, but the company hasn’t gotten any more specific yet. They’re also vague on price point: it’ll run “less than $400.” Acer’s recently-launched 8-inch Iconia sells for around $299, so Toshiba would do well to get close to that mark, at least with the 16GB version.